Professionals vs Influencers

If you’ve paid any attention to markets over the past few years, you’ve probably heard of Roaring Kitty. A YouTube persona. A Reddit username. A retail investor who became a folk hero after helping fuel a short squeeze that rattled Wall Street and nearly sank a major hedge fund. He wasn’t the first finance influencer, but he became a symbol of something much larger: financial advice no longer flows through a single, professional gatekeeper.

That reality makes many people uneasy, especially those who work in finance. But the data tells a much more interesting story than “people don’t trust professionals anymore.”

When investors are asked who they trust most for financial advice, professionals still dominate. Advisors rank near the top, while social media influencers rank near the bottom.

Yet behavior complicates that picture. Investors who already work with an advisor are actually more likely to engage with financial advice they see on social media than investors who don’t. Not less. More.

At first glance, that feels backwards. But it makes perfect sense once you understand how people use information. Most investors aren’t making serious, irreversible decisions off a single video or Reddit post. Social media acts as a spark. It introduces ideas, frames questions, and surfaces possibilities. Then people take those ideas elsewhere—to research, reflection, and often to a professional they already trust. This dynamic isn’t new. Doctors have complained about patients consulting WebMD for decades, not because trust disappeared, but because curiosity increased.

Generational differences reinforce this pattern. Younger investors are far more likely to use social media for both financial news and advice, while older generations lean more heavily on traditional sources. For Gen Z and millennials, social platforms are a normal entry point. For Gen X, they’re supplemental. For boomers, they’re peripheral. That doesn’t mean younger investors are careless. In fact, most report that advice they followed from social media worked out reasonably well.

But this is where people often draw the wrong conclusion.

Good outcomes don’t automatically validate good advice. Markets can reward risk for long stretches of time, and when they do, luck masquerades as skill. Advice that “worked” may have carried far more risk than the person taking it realized at the time. The danger isn’t that influencers are always wrong. It’s that success hides fragility.

Most influencers are not bad actors. Many are thoughtful, articulate, and well-intentioned. The problem isn’t motivation—it’s structure. Influencers speak to broad audiences. They can’t see your balance sheet, your tax situation, your job stability, your family obligations, or your long-term goals. They optimize for clarity and engagement, not suitability. Advice that is reasonable for one person can be completely inappropriate for another, and there’s no practical way for an influencer to account for that.

That’s why even good advice can be dangerous when it’s applied without context.

This is exactly the gap I try to address in my book. Rather than telling people what they “should” do, it focuses on how to think through financial decisions on a case-by-case basis. The goal isn’t to replace professionals or dismiss outside ideas. It’s to give people a framework for evaluating advice—any advice—before acting on it.

In my book, The Strategic Money Method, I return to a simple idea over and over: financial decisions don’t exist in isolation. A choice that looks smart on paper may be wrong for you once risk tolerance, timing, tradeoffs, and downstream consequences are considered. Instead of asking, “Is this a good investment?” the better questions are, “What role would this play in my life?” and “What problem is this actually solving?”

That mindset is how you protect yourself in a world where financial advice is everywhere.

Social media is best used as a source of ideas, not instructions. If something catches your attention, that’s fine. Curiosity is healthy. But curiosity should lead to slower thinking, not instant action. Pressure-test the idea against your own reality. Can you afford this level of risk? What happens if it goes wrong early, not late? How does this interact with everything else you’re already doing?

Those questions matter more than the tactic itself.

This is also where strategy becomes more important than rules. Strategy anchors decisions to direction and priorities rather than trends or personalities. Without that anchor, it’s easy to chase ideas that feel smart in isolation but don’t actually move you toward the life you want to build.

Professionals still play a critical role in this process. They aren’t competing with influencers for attention. They’re helping translate noise into decisions that fit a specific person, not a generic audience. People don’t want less information. They want help interpreting it.

The most dangerous advice isn’t always wrong. Often, it’s incomplete, oversimplified, or disconnected from context. Learning how to evaluate ideas—whether they come from an advisor, a book, or a social media post—is the skill that actually compounds over time.

That’s what I’m trying to teach.